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The sales proposition

FAB's, USP's and UPB's (Features Advantages Benefits, Unique Selling Propositions/Points, and Unique Perceived Benefits)

The product offer, or sales proposition, is how the product or service is described and promoted to the customer. The product offer is what the sales person uses to attract attention and interest in verbal and written introductions to prospects - so it has to be concise and quick - remember that attention needs to be grabbed in less than five seconds. It's also used by the selling company in its various advertising and promotional material aimed at the target market. Traditionally the selling company's marketing department would formulate the product offer, but nowadays the sales person greatly improves his selling effectiveness if he able to refine and adapt the product offer (not the specification) for targeted sectors and individual major prospects.

Developing and tailoring a product offer, or proposition, is a vital part of the selling process, and the approach to this has changed over the years.

FAB's

The technique of linking features, advantages, and benefits (FAB's) was developed in the 1960's and it remains an important basic concept for successful selling and sales training. FAB's were traditionally identified and by the company and handed by the training department to the sales people, who rarely thought much about developing them.

Here is the principle of using Features, Advantages, Benefits:

Customers don't buy features, they don't even buy the advantages - what they buy is what the product's features and advantages will do for them, which in selling parlance is called the benefit.

For example: A TV might have the feature of internet connectivity and a remote control qwerty keyboard; the advantage is that the customer can now access and interchange internet and TV services using a single system; and the benefit is that the customer saves money, space, and a lot of time through not having to change from one piece of equipment to another.

It's the saving in money, space and hassle that the customer buys. A sales person who formulates a sales proposition or product offer around those benefits will sell far more Internet TV's than a sales person who simply sells 'TV's with internet connectivity and remote qwerty keypads'. In fact lots of customers won't even have a clue as to what a 'TV with internet connectivity and remote qwerty keypad' is, particularly when it's packaged, branded and promoted as the latest 'WebTV XL520 with the new Netmaster GT500 Supa-consul'....

Moreover the few customers who recognise the product benefit by its features and advantages will also recognise all the competitors' products too, which will cause all the sales people selling features and advantages to converge on the most astute purchasing group, leaving the most lucrative uninformed prospects largely untouched.

The aim is to formulate a product offer which elegantly comprises enough of what the product does and how, with the most important or unique benefits for a given target market or prospect type.

USP's

The strongest benefit for a given target sector is often represented by the term USP, meaning unique selling point or proposition (for many companies no real uniqueness exists in their USP's, so the term is often used rather loosely where the word 'strongest' would be more apt). Real or perceived uniqueness is obviously very important because it generally causes a prospect to buy from one sales person or supplier as opposed to another. If there were umpteen WebTV's on the market, the ones that would sell the best would be those which had the strongest unique selling points.

Price is not a USP; sure, some people only buy the cheapest, but most do not; most will pay a little or a lot extra to get what they want. As with the example of the WebTV, an advantage that produces a money-saving benefit is different to straight-forward price discounting. A low price is not a benefit in this context, and any product that is marketed purely with a low-price USP will always be vulnerable to competition which offers proper user-related benefits, most of which may come in the form of a higher value, higher price package.

What makes it difficult to succeed all the time with a fixed USP or series of USP's is that one man's USP is another man's dead donkey - USP's by their nature fail to take account of a prospect's particular circumstances and detailed needs. The name itself - unique selling point - says it all. Purchasers of all sorts are more interested in buying, not